A commentary on ‘one hundred most cited articles related to pancreaticoduodenectomy surgery: a bibliometric analysis’ (Int J Surg. 2022 Aug; 104: 106775.)
Authors: Min WU, Jie Huang
Journal: International Journal of Surgery (2023)

Dear Editor, Pancreaticoduodenectomy (PD) provides a chance of radical cure in patients with pancreatic head or periampullary lesions. Although PD has been practiced for more than 100 years, it is still an extremely complicated and challenging procedure due to the dissection and reconstruction of the digestive system. Notably, considerable research related to PD surgery has been published, enhancing knowledge in this field. In addition, it is easy to use bibliometric methods to examine these countless publications. Bibliometrics has given us a tool that can easily be scaled from the micro level (institute) to the macro level (world)1. With great interest, we read the results of the study conducted by He and colleagues that was recently published in the International Journal of Surgery. In this article, He et al2. performed a bibliometric analysis of the most cited articles associated with PD surgery and indicated that the USA was the dominant country with respect to the number of articles, researchers, and institutions. Laparoscopic or minimally invasive PD would be a future research hotspot. However, I would like to discuss some of my concerns. First, the description of the search strategy in this article is vague. PD is also called the Whipple procedure or pancreatoduodenectomy, which is not considered in the search strategy of this article. This may lead to the lack of some articles and make the results of bibliometric analysis shift. Similar to the writing of reviews, we need to be clear about the search strategy, which is helpful for the follow-up and analysis of this hot topic later. Second, inarticulate, misspelled, abbreviated, and synonymous keywords may affect the results of the keyword co-occurrence analysis and hotspot analysis, which need data cleaning to get an accurate result. Data cleaning, also called data cleansing or scrubbing, involves detecting and removing errors and inconsistencies from data to improve data quality. Due to the different ways of using keywords, there are synonyms, abbreviations, and spelling errors. So the dirty keyword data may mislead the result of the co-occurrence analysis. This is also the part that is currently not mentioned in many bibliometric analysis articles. Third, the article was searched using a single database, and the newly published heavyweight articles may not be selected because of the number of citations, which may lead to a data offset; this has also been mentioned in the discussion. Now, a new bibliometric score has been published that mathematically determines which papers are the most ‘disruptive’ which may change the analysis based on the citations. For example, if an article is cited a lot, but none of the articles in that paper’s bibliography are cited, then that article is considered disruptive or introducing a new concept3. In this ever-changing era, disruptive articles will become more recognized than nondisruptive articles. So, we need more research on whether the disruptive parameters can give more accurate results or not. Although exist the above-mentioned concerns, this article may be the first that use the bibliometric analysis to conduct the TOP 100 cited articles related to PD and predict the future development of PD. We thank the author for his work on the review of articles about PD. Ethical approval Not applicable. Source of funding None. Authors’ contribution M.W.: writing. J.H.: design. Conflicts of interest disclosure The authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest. Research registration unique identifying number (UIN) None. Guarantor Jie Huang.